I’m the co-founder of WikiTravel?. I have some half-baked ideas about the Internet in general and wikis in particular. I’m a FreeSoftware? advocate and an OpenContent fanatic. My motto: “There is no ‘I’ in ‘Wiki’.”

I tend to start pages from here when I don’t want to figure out where they should really go.

July 24, 2007

I launched a new wiki on July 24th. It’s called Vinismo, and it’s a multilingual, CC-licensed, world-wide wine guide. We launched in English and French, but I hope to get Spanish, German, Chinese and Italian launched before the end of the year (so we have all of the top 10 wine-producing countries covered). Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Hungarian, Greek, Ukrainian and Croatian would round out the top 20 (see http://vinismo.com/en/List_of_wine-producing_countries ).

I hope it’s going to be fun. I like drinking wine, and I’d love to have other people join in. It’s a really elitist, snobby field that could use some democratization.

July 17, 2007

Myself, Evan, and MarkDilley were going to chat about this via Gizmo on Saturday. I would have to ask both Evan and MarkDilley, but I can guess that others from here would be welcome, too. I’ll also record the call and upload somewhere. Evan, MarkDilley, do you mind?

Waiting to hear back from Mark/Evan about time, will post here. If you miss it, Lion, will try to arrange another call about this some time next week. Would be cool to get lots of insights and ideas, criticisms, etc, from experienced wiki users.

April 10, 2007

April 23, 2006

I was embarrassed to see that Christophe had to get news about Wikitravel from Ross Mayfield’s blog, instead of from me. So I figured I’d make a late announcement about it here.

My wife Maj and I announced last week that WikiTravel? and WorldSixtySix? were both acquired by a company called Internet Brands, Inc. We’re going to be gradually integrating the two sites’ content and communities. On-site advertising will support our development and admin work, as well as hardware and other software dev.

We’re pretty excited about the events; Wikitravel and World66 have such similar goals that it’s been wasteful to be competing for so long. We also think that having a commercial company back up the projects will mean more stability and less sleepless nights for the two of us.

So far the Wikitravel community has been supportive, although a little trepidatious about what lies ahead. I for one am pretty happy that a company was willing to put money behind an Open Content, Open Source wiki community Web site. I’m not sure what this means for other wikis, but I’m glad ours is on more sure footing today.

Hé Evan, don’t be embarrassed. Bravo & Congratulations. Think that’s very good news for all of us and the credibility and legitimacy of our future public wiki-communities. I often mention Wikitravel as a very clever and focused project. SebPaquet talked me last week of a bilingual RecentChangesCamp session next year in Montréal. Hope I could find enough money to attend and have the pleasure to meet you and talk about this very kind form of wiki-business

May 1, 2004

I’m going to be on the road for the next two weeks, driving my very beautiful and impractical car around the circumference of the east-of-the-Mississippi part of North America. Folks in Toronto, Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, Florida, DC, NYC, or the APs should send me a mail and we can do some impromptu meetuping.

April 13, 2004

Wikitravel was featured in an article on BBC Online about DIY travel guides. We got seriously flooded with new users and lots of fresh info.

Mar 5, 2004

A case study written by myself and Maj about Wikitravel appeared in CMFocus magazine.

Also, I found this Agora wiki about MUDs and MMPORGs and stuff. I think there’s probably an overlap with CommunityWiki – I don’t see it referenced here or on MeatBall? anywhere. Probably ripe for some community cross-talk!

Feb 12, 2004

Feb 11, 2004

So, I’m realizing that my page here is starting to look bloggy, so I might as well add some dates while I’m at it.

We have a new French Wikitravel language version up (just barely); see http://www.wikitravel.org/fr/ for details. We have a kind of weird language version policy; we have sister sites for different languages, but I kinda refuse to host any wiki that’s not alive and dynamic. I really don’t want to have a lot of security-hole language version wikis sitting around. So we’ve got a more restrictive language version policy than, say, Wikipedia. We’ll see how it goes.

Also: after being on Orkut for a couple of days, I just don’t see why noone’s set up a SocialNetworkWiki?. Seems pretty easy to do! --EvanProdromou

I don’t feel comfortable, after exercising my RightToLeave?, hopping in to make a lot of trouble about UseRealNames on MeatBall?. But it’s also weird to see someone addressing me and asking me questions when I’m not going to respond.

I wasn’t aware how interchangeable pages on CommunityWiki and MeatBall? are. It’s funny slipping into another community – especially one with different BehavioralNorms? – when you didn’t expect it.

Hm, maybe my suggestion wasn’t that good. It just felt weird to discuss the Meatball policy on this wiki. We can discuss the merits of using real names in general here as well, of course. I just hope there isn’t much to discuss. – AlexSchroeder

I think we were all mixed up, then. I was commenting on CW policy, not about Meatball. --EvanProdromou

I agree that we shouldn’t discuss Meatball policy for UseRealNames on this wiki. However, I do think that we need to address UseRealNames.

I’d like to see this page do these things:

Say that we use “Real” names here. (Please follow it.)

Say that we’re not dogmatic about it, it’s just the site preference.

Summarize arguments for and against the use of real names, in a relatively non-judgemental NPOV-ish way.

I feel we should not delegate general discussion about UseRealNames over to Sunir’s wiki. Sunir’s wiki has very specific and dogmatic ideas about UseRealNames. It feels a little like delegating all discussion of religion to, say, the Mormon church’s wiki. I believe we should try to reflect the larger collection of perspectives about UseRealNames.

We are not dogmatic about real names. We have it as a policy, and we follow that policy. But we are not dogmatic about it. I don’t think the participants of this wiki (Alex included) think that it is a decision that every wiki should follow, or that online culture in general should follow. I think we agree that rational folk may support non-“Real” names.

Weird! I was just in the process of revising the UseRealNames page as you wrote this. Please take a look and see if I did a good job at it. --EvanProdromou

I just want to make sure you saw it- AlexSchroeder made InformationPropagation to include what you were saying in InformationChemicalPotential?. Just to make sure you know about it, and see it. (I agree; What happened to InformationChemicalPotential? was a little too cold.) We still want to keep the main idea, and strongly welcome your contributions. – LionKimbro

Hi Evan. I have just red your SuperordinateGoal that I could translate later when I will find a good french wikiword to translate ordinate ? . Just a question, would you be interested to include WikiTravel? in the WikiSchool project ?

I have to admit I haven’t taken a look at the WikiSchool project, but I will right now, and let you know! I should probably point out, though, that I don’t have much authority to make unilateral decisions about Wikitravel.

Thanks Alex. This Evan’s contribution could be translated soon in ModèleAttributionAuteur. Evan, just wanted to thank you for making me discover the Gaim JabberClient? in French via FreeCultureDotOrg?. Could be an opportunity to log on InternetRelayChat Will have to check soon the french pages on WikiTravel? I presented last tuesday in WikiSchoolParis?